Tetiana Bulakh

TETIANA BULAKH, then a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Things That Matter: Humanitarian Aid and Citizenship among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Ukraine,’ supervised by Dr. Sarah D. Phillips. This project investigates humanitarian aid to internally displaced persons (IDPs) and its effects on state-citizens relationships in Ukraine. Since 2014, an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine have forced more than 1.4 million people to leave their homes and become IDPs. Whereas refugees cross national borderlines seeking international assistance, internally displaced citizens largely rely on the state support. For IDPs, humanitarian aid is not only a matter of addressing material needs, but also an issue of citizens’ rights to social protection and welfare as provided by the state. Employing ethnographic techniques, the research explores the politics of governance, routes of circulation, and patterns of consumption of material aid. The project combines creative ethnographic methods’like social biographies of aid objects, object-based interviews, and projective tests’with traditional anthropological techniques of interviews and participant observation. Based on the collected qualitative data, the dissertation will explain the role of humanitarian aid not only in rebuilding IDPs’ lives, but also in transformation of citizens’ entitlements in times of emergency and uncertainty.